Renowned runner Lauren Fleshman’s book is ‘Good for a Girl’ and more (2024)

With the news of college basketball great Caitlin Clark and the upcoming Olympic Summer Games featuring the gold-medalist gymnast Simone Biles, there is a lot of focus on female athletes.

So it’s fitting for the Park City Library and the Women’s Giving Fund of the Park City Community Foundation to collaborate on bringing author Lauren Fleshman to town.

Fleshman, elite runner, national champion, advocate for women’s sports and one of the most decorated collegiate athletes of all time, will give a free presentation about her New York Times Best Seller, “Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World,” at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 29, at the Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium, 1255 Park Ave.

The book, which draws on Fleshman’s own experiences as a female athlete and addresses the physically and mentally dangerous discrepancies that women, girls and people in female bodies experience in the local, national and world sports systems.

“The sports industry is one example of many places in our culture that were built and designed by men for men and boys,” Fleshman said. “During the Women’s Rights movement, women fought for the right to access those spaces and jobs and industries, and these spaces themselves didn’t change to accommodate the newcomers. It was adapt-or-die.”

Adapting to some of those spaces didn’t carry many negative consequences for women and girls, but the world of sports did and still does, Fleshman said.

Girls drop out of sports more often than boys when they hit puberty, and female collegiate athletes are at higher risk to experience injury, eating disorders or mental health struggles, according to Fleshman.

“(For example) there are things happening inside the body of a female as it goes through puberty and adolescence, which goes all the way through 26 years old, and the sports systems are not designed to accommodate those changes,” she said. “Because of that, there is a lot of shame that surrounds female puberty. There is pressure to fight against it or to lose weight or do other things that have long-term consequences.”

Those issues expand from the individual to the team, and then there’s the broader culture of marketing, Fleshman said.

“So I use my athletic career, lived experiences and my education at Stanford and retrospective look as an elite coach and feminist to highlight how the sports industry is harming women and girls and how that is avoidable,” she said. “We can change it, very easily, actually. But it’s a conversation that we haven’t been having in a productive way.”

Fleshman’s idea to write a book came through her desire to tell her own story.

She began with a blog and then began writing a column for Runners World magazine.

“My essay writing showed me the power of personal story, not just for the reader, but for myself — personal therapy, right?” she said.

Fleshman wanted to address the pressures of being a woman in the sports industry, and she wanted to tell that story truthfully.

“With my blog, I wanted to see what it would be like to tell more of a complete sports story with all the highs and lows,” she said. “I knew other people were experiencing it, but you couldn’t find honest writing about this online.”

The closest information Fleshman could find about athletes expressing their peaks and valleys was through stories that spotlighted wins and major accomplishments.

“If an athlete talked about rough times, it was usually during the moment of glory when everyone would look back and say, ‘You’ve been through some rough times,'” she said. “We like to celebrate champions, and there is shame around not winning and shame around struggle and shame around injury. So you had to wait until you won before you could talk about the struggles.”

Fleshman realized through feedback that people felt less alone while they read about the struggles and issues.

“Women and girls are experiencing injury and illness three-to-five times the rate of our male peers because of these forces in the sports system,” she said. “As my career ended as an elite athlete and I moved into coaching, I began to see how my experiences and observations continued to repeat themselves. Things hadn’t changed with kids coming into the system today.”

Fleshman was hit hard by the story of Mary Cain, a 2014 World Junior Champion in the 3000 meter event, and who, at 17, became the youngest American athlete to represent the United States at a track and field World Championships.

After signing with the Nike Oregon Project, Cain’s performance declined, and that was later attributed to the “abusive, toxic culture” by her coaches, including head coach Alberto Salazaar, that led to an array of physical difficulties and injury.

Sports Illustrated investigated and found similar instances with other athletes reaching back to 2008. Cain sued Nike Oregon Project and her coaches in 2021, and the case was settled in 2023 for an undisclosed amount.

“I watched Mary rise as a young phenom, and I had already seen 15 young phenoms rise before her only to be chewed up by the system and forgotten about,” she said. “I was old enough and in a position of coaching to truly grasp what was happening, and that disturbed me so much.”

Fleshman also felt dismayed because she knew Cain’s story would outrage people for a few days and then be forgotten.

“I knew this would just keep happening, no matter how many individuals go through this, so I wanted to put a story together that had more staying power,” she said.

While addressing the issues that negatively impact women in sports, the other goal for Fleshman to write her book was to tell her own sports story.

“Some people will read this sports story and accidentally end up reading about social justice issues, and other other people will come for the social commentary and end up reading a sports story,” she said with a laugh. “I have found through literature that it’s easier to place your own experiences and observations when you read someone else’s life or about people you love. The light bulbs go off.”

The book has provided Fleshman with a great opportunity to talk to teens and families about how they can do things differently when venturing into the competitive sports arena.

“My hope is that through showing people my pathway is to bring people into the rooms I’ve been in or the stages I’ve been on and help them see how one person’s story can tie a lot of these things together,” she said.

Fleshman enjoys giving these presentations because she likes seeing how many people can relate to the stories in her book.

“I love hearing from people when they tell me that something clicked, especially older women who were once athletic or didn’t have an athletic career but could have if they were born in a different time,” she said. “There is a lot of unresolved story telling that these and other women carry within themselves because of their experiences or lack of experiences in the sports movement. So it’s very rewarding to see how it lands with people, and they change the story they have been carrying about themselves after attending one of my talks.”

Still, Fleshman knows the solutions of these problems are unlikely to be solved by a “savior in power, waving a wand.”

“It really is dependent on more people shifting their perspectives around the female experience,” she said. “We need to see natural things like puberty as a positive. We need to encourage girls to be comfortable going through their body changes, and we need to fight against forces who make them feel bad about themselves when they look into a mirror.”

While Fleshman knows men and boys also struggle with these issues, they affect a higher percentage of women and girls.

“It’s important to identify where this is happening, because it takes up brainspace and zaps their collective and individual power,” she said. “To have stronger individuals, families and cities, you can’t lose if you help women and remove some of these forces that have kept them small.”

Although Fleshman knew addressing the issues she wrote about in “Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World” was important, she was still surprised to see the book become a New York Times Best Seller.

“Usually if you’re an athlete writing a book, you pretty much need to be an Olympian or a gold medal winner in order to write a bestseller, but I wasn’t,” she said. “I had been on world championship teams and considered my career successful, but I was never a household name. I wrote the book myself, but I had a great publisher and great publicity team, and they believed in it.”

Still, becoming a best-selling author and appearing on Terry Gross’ NPR program Fresh Air program showed Fleshman what she was writing about was, and still is, important.

“I realized that all of this wasn’t just in my head,” she said. “I exhausted my friends and family talking about it, and I probably filled up 40 to 50 journals, writing about this topic and trying to figure it out by putting the pieces together, being angry about it and trying to help in some way. So, it was affirming to know that this was something people — especially dads, uncles, a lot of men who have women in their lives — care about.”